Tag: madoguchi

“It’s a black hole. We send information to Japan and never get anything back”

One of the German consultants on our team in Europe is a Toyota Production System expert.  I asked her what she recommends to mixed Japanese and European teams in the companies she advises, if they are not communicating well. To my surprise, instead of talking about concepts and processes such as gembashugi (going to the place where the work is happening) or visualisation, she replied that first of all she gets them to agree on a vision for the team.

I discussed in previous articles in this series that in order for Japan headquarters to coordinate effectively with their European subsidiaries, they need first of all to look at the people concerned, and make sure there are clearly understood counterparts, madoguchi (window into an organisation) and tantousha (person in charge).

It may seem that the obvious next step is to set up communication processes between these people, but I think my German colleague is right, that without a vision for the end goal of this communication, many of these processes will become ineffective or die out.
For example, a British company I advise, who have a subsidiary in Japan, told me that they hold regular global teleconferences for certain business and research areas. However they recently discovered that the representative from one of the teams in Japan merely attends the teleconference and does not share what was learned with the rest of their team members.  Clearly the Japanese representative does not see the value in cascading further what they heard.

Similarly, the Japanese expatriates at a Japanese manufacturer in the UK told me they all send weekly hokoku (1 pager reports) back to Japan (in Japanese of course), but when in the past they tried to get the British managers involved, the British soon lost interest, seeing it as an additional bureaucratic burden.  “It’s a black hole”, one of the British managers told me.  “We send information to Japan but never get anything back”.  Again, they could not see the benefit to being involved in the communication process.  In both this case and the previous case, employees need to feel they are getting information back in return for their input, which is relevant to their jobs.

Many Japanese companies say they have a vision, but in my experience these are often too vague to be actionable.  By actionable, I mean that the vision has enough substance that you can make decisions based on it.  Most visions for Japanese B2B manufacturers can be summarised as “contributing to society through innovation” which is actionable to some extent, but means that the company cannot really differentiate itself from its competitors who are saying the same thing.   So customers also cannot see the benefit of choosing one supplier over another.

The vision that the company, and the teams within the company have should be differentiated from its competitors, and be actionable.  The benefit to behaving in accordance with the vision has to be clear and understood by employees.  Once that is in place, the processes for communication and compliance between the headquarters and its subsidiaries will almost take care of themselves.

This article was originally published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book  “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe”  – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on  Amazon.

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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Women in Japanese Business

Many of my clients who have Japanese customers have been asking me recently whether there will be a problem if they put a woman in charge of a Japanese client account. Being female myself, I instinctively want to support other women in business and declare that there should not be a problem.

I never felt discriminated against or even any resistance from clients in the nine years I worked in a Japanese company, selling to Japanese customers for many of those years. No doubt it helped that I clearly had the endorsement of my blue chip Japanese company, and that I spoke fluent Japanese. Also, as I described in my previous article, the “person in charge” role I had, known as madoguchi or tantosha, is understood to have a team behind it, including a team leader and general manager, so if there was some need to have a senior, male person involved, this could easily be arranged.

I also thought there were some positive advantages to being female. I sensed the clients enjoyed the novelty of having a young, foreign female to deal with and that they also felt more relaxed and were more open with me than they might have been with a male salesperson. Showing that you are intelligent and competent is of course key, as well as making the most of the perception that (rightly or wrongly), women are more detail oriented and accurate.

It is harder for Japanese women than foreign women to gain management roles, as there is a widespread assumption that that any Japanese woman must be in an administrative role. This is based in harsh reality – Japan has the lowest percentage of companies with a woman in senior positions, according to a worldwide survey published by Grant Thornton this year. Nonetheless, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey and PwC all have or have had Japanese women as partners or in senior positions in their Japan offices and Accenture Japan makes a special point of welcoming women graduates in its recruitment.

Even Japan-headquartered companies are having to change the way they treat women employees. “Tayousei” (diversity) has become a buzzword, and is taken to mean giving equal career opportunities to women. Most major companies stopped graduate recruitment of so-called ‘Office Ladies’ in the 1990s and now outsource most of their administrative staffing needs to temp agencies. Although the number of women in the management track at major companies has not increased dramatically, with an ageing population and a dearth of middle management due to hiring freezes in the 1990s, making the best use of half the population has become a necessity rather than window dressing.

I have heard Japanese men say that the reason they don’t put women in client facing positions is that women “don’t drink”, which is a euphemism, I suppose, for the client entertainment, in hostess bars and so on, which are deemed by some in Japan to be necessary for good business relationships. This may be so, but frankly, if the main reason your customer chooses you as a supplier is because of your in-depth knowledge of girlie bars, you have a problem!

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly.  This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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‘Tantosha’ and ‘madoguchi’ coordinate communication traffic

When I worked for a Japanese multinational in the UK, I used to answer my phone with the name of the company. Annoyingly, this meant I was often mistaken for a secretary or a receptionist, but I persisted because I knew it was what our Japanese customers and colleagues expected. We all had direct lines, both in the UK and Japan, but in Japan there was ‘group pick up’ for each team and it was considered unprofessional to let any phone on the team ring more than a few times. Voicemail was not used and still is not widespread in Japan.

Japanese customers expect to get through to the person in charge, the tantosha, or someone who is on their team. We had a whiteboard calendar in my Japanese office, where everyone wrote in their business trips and meetings, so each team member knew where the others were. We also knew the basics of each other’s business, thanks to the fact that, as in most Japanese companies, we had an open plan office, with teams clustered together, so we could hear and see what other team members were doing. So not only could we tell the customer where the tantosha was, but we could usually say something more helpful about the status of their business than “can I take a message?”

A tantosha is not necessarily in charge of the team nor do they have ultimate decision-making authority but does have day-to-day responsibility for that customer’s business.

The term ‘madoguchi’, window, is sometimes used, when someone is the ‘window’ into an overseas office or another partner company. They may not be the expert or decision maker that the other company ultimately need to speak to, but they are the ‘first port of call’ or may be in charge of the overall coordination of a deal.

An Australian fund manager I met last week commented on this ‘madoguchi’ system. “I think the poor Japanese guy in the company we were dealing with was confused and overworked, because he seemed to be the only person on their side working on the deal. Whereas on our side there were about half a dozen people he had to talk to, each expert in their own area, and each with decision making authority. He, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any decision making power at all.”

Japanese customers are accustomed to this idea of an assigned contact person, who is accessible at almost all times, who is part of a team that works collaboratively, and the access point to a network of decision makers and experts. In the UK, many of the professional services firms I advise, such as accountants and lawyers, have adapted to this expectation by setting up a “Japan Desk”, manned by Japanese speakers, who deal with incoming client queries, divert them away from using costly senior management time and provide customers with accessible, consistent and knowledgeable service.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly.  This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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